Terrific Book | Effective Perl Programming: Writing Better Programs with Perl (A-W Developers Press) |...

Great Perl Book | Effective Perl Programming: Writing Better Programs with Perl (A-W Developers Press) | Joseph N. Hall, Randal Schwartz

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	• Effective Perl Programming: Writing Better Programs with Perl (A-W Developers Press) Joseph N. Hall, Randal Schwartz Addison-Wesley Professional, 1998 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 45 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Not always clear

Well, even though I rate this book only 3 stars, I do think it belongs to the shelf of any serious Perl programmer. (Of course, don't just let it sit there; read it!) I think the emphasis here is it's useful only for the *serious* Perl person, as it contains lots of in-depth discussion on the nitty-gritty details of Perl's idiosyncratic personalities.

The reason I don't like the book as much as I thought I would is things are not explained clearly much of the time. Take the chapter on references for example. While the authors include lots of examples, the explanation of how nested references work is just confusing. Granted, this is a nasty concept to grasp, but I expected something clearer. Instead they just say "oh this looks ugly", which is not helpful. BTW, if you are pulling your hair out over references like I am, the Dumper pragma (not the dump function) is extremely helpful. (Unfortunately, it's not mentioned in this book, nor in the camel book).

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Terrific Book

I'm fairly new to Perl (but not to programming) and this book is great. I really like the format of the code examples, and there's a lot of wisdom here on writing good, idiomatic Perl.

Great Perl Book

This book shows you some efficient and interesting ways of using Perl. It is very informative and I often use it when I want to see if there is a better way of doing something.

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A fast track to idiomatic Perl

This is a good book for getting a handle on intermediate level Perl and its idiomatic uses, arranged as a series of 60 'items' -- the debt to Effective C++ is obvious. This is not a tutorial on Perl, you should at least be at the level of The Llama and ideally be somewhat acquainted with the material covered in The Alpaca, too. Although similar ground is covered in this book to the latter, I would treat this book as a way to shore up your previous knowledge, rather than learning it for the first time.

The content holds up surprisingly well for 1997. The opening chapters cover a lot of the oddities and gotchas of life with Perl, such as slicing, the various connotations of undef, a persuasive defence of $_ and where + is necessary to disambiguate. The final 'miscellany' chapter also contains useful information in a similar vein. And this also appears to be one of the first books to detail the now famous Schwartzian transform and the Orcish manoeuvre for sorting, so it has a certain historical appeal.

Equally, the chapters on debugging, references, regular expressions and object oriented programming are also pretty good. It's just that there are now several other books that cover these topics. If you only want one book in this style, Perl Best Practices bestrides the field like a colossus, being more comprehensive, and better written. Not that there's anything wrong with the writing here, it's never boring as such, but it does feel flat.

Nonetheless, Effective Perl Programming does the job it sets out to do fairly well, and I find you can never have too much help in explaining the nooks and crannies of idiomatic Perl, so this is still worth getting hold of, particularly because you can find it at an extremely reasonable price.

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great book

this book is "MUST HAVE" Perl book!
It gives you great idea to simply your code and algorithm.

The book on Perl that experienced Perl programmers have been looking for, Effective Perl Programming explains idiomatic Perl, covering the latest release (Version 5). It includes information and useful examples about the structure, functions, and latest capabilities of the language, such as self-documenting object-oriented modules. Learn from Hall's answers to "real life" questions and problems he receives from newsgroups and his Perl seminars.

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